All People Matter

Here is the weekly round-up of the Texas Progressive Alliance. The TPA is a confederation of the best political bloggers in Texas. The round-up is at the end of this post.

With the round-up this weekend, since Memorial Day tomorrow, is a group portrait of African-American officers taken in Houston in 1918. The names of the men are given as —Lieutenant Benati H. Lee, Lieutenant Harry Murphy, Lieutenant Fred Johnson, Lieutenant Claudius Ballard, Lieutenant Harry Allen, Lieutenant Edward Douglas, Lieutenant Louis Washington, Lieutenant George L. Amos, Lieutenant Samuel A. McGowan, and Lieutenant Frank McFarland, 370th infantry. This picture is at the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.

I did not know that black officers would have been stationed and trained in a Southern city such as Houston as long ago as 1918.

As it turns out, the fact that these troops were in Houston was a source of tension that led to a riot

“In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, the War Department, taking advantage of the temperate climate and newly opened Houston Ship Channel, ordered two military installations built in Harris County—Camp Logan and Ellington Field. The Illinois National Guard was to train at Camp Logan, located on the northwest outskirts of the city. To guard the construction site, on July 27, 1917, the army ordered the Third Battalion of the black Twenty-fourth United States Infantry to travel by train with seven white officers from the regimental encampment at Columbus, New Mexico, to Houston. From the outset, the black contingent faced racial discrimination when they received passes to go into the city. A majority of the men had been raised in the South and were familiar with segregation, but as army servicemen they expected equal treatment. Those individuals responsible for keeping order, especially the police, streetcar conductors, and public officials, viewed the presence of black soldiers as a threat to racial harmony. Many Houstonians thought that if the black soldiers were shown the same respect as white soldiers, black residents of the city might come to expect similar treatment….On August 23, 1917, a riot erupted in Houston. Near noon, two policemen arrested a black soldier for interfering with their arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Early in the afternoon, when Cpl. Charles Baltimore, one of the twelve black military policemen with the battalion, inquired about the soldier’s arrest, words were exchanged and the policeman hit Baltimore over the head. The MPs fled. The police fired at Baltimore three times, chased him into an unoccupied house, and took him to police headquarters. Though he was soon released, a rumor quickly reached Camp Logan that he had been shot and killed. A group of soldiers decided to march on the police station in the Fourth Ward and secure his release…. Maj. Kneeland S. Snow, battalion commander, initially discounted the news of impending trouble. Around 8 P.M. Sgt. Vida Henry of I Company confirmed the rumors, and Kneeland ordered the first sergeants to collect all rifles and search the camp for loose ammunition. During this process, a soldier suddenly screamed that a white mob was approaching the camp. Black soldiers rushed into the supply tents, grabbed rifles, and began firing wildly in the direction of supposed mob. The white officers found it impossible to restore order. Sergeant Henry led over 100 armed soldiers toward downtown Houston by way of Brunner Avenue and San Felipe Street and into the Fourth Ward. In their two-hour march on the city, the mutinous blacks killed fifteen whites, including four policemen, and seriously wounded twelve others, one of whom, a policeman, subsequently died. Four black soldiers also died. Two were accidentally shot by their own men, one in camp and the other on San Felipe Street. After they had killed Capt. Joseph Mattes of the Illinois National Guard, obviously mistaking him for a policeman, the blacks began quarreling over a course of action. After two hours, Henry advised the men to slip back into camp in the darkness—and shot himself in the head…Early next morning, August 24, civil authorities imposed a curfew in Houston. On the twenty-fifth, the army hustled the Third Battalion aboard a train to Columbus, New Mexico. There, seven black mutineers agreed to testify against the others in exchange for clemency. Between November 1, 1917, and March 26, 1918, the army held three separate courts-martial in the chapel at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The military tribunals indicted 118 enlisted men of I Company for participating in the mutiny and riot, and found 110 guilty. It was wartime, and the sentences were harsh. Nineteen mutinous soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison. One was judged incompetent to stand trial. Two white officers faced courts-martial, but they were released. No white civilians were brought to trial. The Houston Riot of 1917 was one of the saddest chapters in the history of American race relations. It vividly illustrated the problems that the nation struggled with on the home front during wartime.”

“More than 350,000 African Americans served in segregated units during World War I, mostly as support troops. Several units saw action alongside French soldiers fighting against the Germans, and 171 African Americans were awarded the French Legion of Honor. In response to protests of discrimination and mistreatment from the black community, several hundred African American men received officers’ training in Des Moines, Iowa. By October 1917, over six hundred African Americans were commissioned as captains and first and second lieutenants.”

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You don’t like it cause the white man losing his power. Yes I said the white man is losing his power. Everywhere you look it happening.

Here a lesbian running the city. Here a meskin own the airwaves. Here a Muslim, a brother, here the landlord a quiet Chinese but he don’t bow and scrape. You used to buck your teeth and squint and he remembers. Now you pay the man.

For you the only black man worth mention is Bill Cosby or Famous Amos. That what they teach you in the schools. But you do not have the power to stop Louis Farrakhan.

You locked up H Rap Brown, Huey Newton, the only place you keep a black woman on her knees.

You keep the monkey on the junkie back, locked up tight and messed up so when he come out he ties up again, maybe this time be the last.

You deny the Tea Party a white supremacist organization. But I don’t see any black faces in that crowd.

You say that your Miss America not barred to any color, but when the real beauty win you claim it was rigged against the whites. Oh you losing your looks too baby.

And you don’t like it.

That’s why you keep a list and laws. That’s why you lie about it, distort the figures on murder, kidnapping, rape, the crimes that white people refuse to do. Assaults, smugglers, drop houses, home invasions, drugs and welfare recipients. These are the small pox blankets poisoning the minds of America.

And who care about something – anything! — other than that a socialist.

Presidents elected while black deserve the black ball. No matter he cleaning house after the white man’s watch, the house that the black men built.

This is America.

What’s not to like and cheer about?

We got illegals in our schools getting learned on the white man’s dime and why is that they always a white man on the dime, nickel, quarter or dollar in the country of freedom and equality. E pluribus unum.

Out of many, one.

Yeah, we know who the money is. We know who the many and who the one.

We got madmen trying to take the Indians out of Cleveland and the Redskins out of Washington. We even got our Fightin’ Whities trying to fake us out.

Rights are there for the white man, promises for everybody else. Promise of reparations promise of reservations, promises never to do it again.

And like every promise ever made by the ones writing those rights who it went to? Who get the benefits? Who turn those words into profit?

Now those laws are turning. This nation is rising up and sinking under your feet. It’s got a rotted core. It’s an earthquake, tsunami, storm and rage that rend the bedrock of your temple. The alabaster pillars going to drop.

The great white father turning to dust.

No more entertainers, no more football players, no more basketball, no more waiters and dishwashers, no more cleaners with your white shirts, nobody to hate cause they part of America too. Look around you.